Legion - Outlaw Rogue Artifact Weapons, Blue Tweets, Beyond the Worlds

[Nythiz]

Voted for Cataclysm... quality raids, so much fun from the start! Burning Crusade would be second for me, then Lich King. Dunno how people vote Lich King the highest. Icecrown was the ONLY good raid in the expansion, and it came at the end. Ulduar was overrated... boring, bland, and tedious.

Don't be silly. Ulduar is regarded as the best raid instance in WoW. It had very diverse bosses; fun mechanics and a lot of lore.
Icecrown is regarded as the second best raid I guess, making WotLK top contender for best expansion from a raiding PoV.

Argent Tournament raid was bad. Naxx wasn't really bad IMO, people just hate on it because it was rehashed content (ironically by popular demand as very few, including me, never got to experience it in Vanilla).

That said. WotLK was a superb expansion when it comes to overall experience (zones / quests / lore / raids). But the poll specifically mentions: " endgame world content". That doesn't say "endgame content" but "endgame WORLD content" which to me means open world things to do at max level. For WotLK that pretty much meant Stormpeak giant dailies; Icecrown dailies and Argent Tournament dailies. There wasn't all that much else.
That's why I disagree WOTLK was best with this kind of wording.

Pandaria should be last on the list.

To each his own I guess.
IMO Pandaria was one of the better expansions as well. Especially considering endgame world content. You had a lot of diverse dailies, you had the farm which was entertaining and profitable without being extremely mandatory (like garrisons are); you had Timeless Isle at the end and Thunder Isle before that as major quest hubs.

Raids in Pandaria were also quite decent (ToT and SoO were both really entertaining raids; the earlier ones a bit less so IMO).
The biggest letdown in Pandaria for me personally was that the whole lore thing didn't appeal to me. I have nothing with Pandaren other than that the brewmaster was a nice easter egg in WC3.

[Dastreus]

mop was garbage.

[tcfoo]

I did read the question. I still liked Wrath the best. Followed closely by MoP.

I liked the Argent Tournament dailies. I liked Hodir. I liked Wyrmrest Accord. Ebon Blade, Kalu-ak...I enjoyed them all. I don't have much of a taste for PvP but I even liked Wintergrasp. I really enjoyed the story & lore incorporated into all of the rep grinds. I still enjoy these zones the most whenever leveling new toons as well. I get to Northrend as quickly as I can, and I stay as until I've completed Icecrown's story quests fully.

[dixincide]

MOP had great world content. Wrath was a good expansion but world content wasn't nearly as good as MoPs

[arthar77]

lol mop was good? ... that was a good joke

[Raeliron]

Well since I felt the The Burning Crusade had a decently strong End-game content, I'll tell you why.

World PvP

Hellfire Fortifications: Even now if you're leveling through Hellfire Peninsula and come across similar lowbies or 70ish toons, you still duke it out. It's only when it gets real that they bring out the 100s to do the ganking because they don't like losing and not being able to accomplish their daily. Though its very little in present day, there are still people like that would duke it out with end level toons to stop them from ganking my lowbie toon. Tokens were worth something then.

Zangramarsh Pillars: Two towers that you must hold control to gain fervor. Not many people did this because not many people wanted to look for where it was. Hint: It was in the center of the map and a little up north. It gave you tokens. Tokens to get gear or whatever you chose.

Terrokar Forest: The Bone Wastes! Who could forget the 6 towers you had to take control of to have the bonus. It lived up to its name. World PvP was a lot of fun here.

Blades Edge Mountains - Ogri'la Farm Rep and Arena spot: The dailies were unique as were the races found here. Learning some lore about Deathwing's other son and Rexxar and the half breeds. All cool stuff. The first talk of the Apex Crystals and the Ethereal that were looking to harvest it. The arena coliseum was a place to fool around and beat your friends butt or the best person on the server.

Nagrand - Halaa: If you weren't helping in gaining control of or defending the post of Halaa, you weren't doing World PvP right. This lasted hours upon hours and guilds would rotate with other guilds in hours to keep the control of it.

Shadowmoon Valley: The Netherwing Rep grind. That was something to look forward to. Getting the crop and the flying mounts felt like a sense of accomplishment considering flying was new at the time. The look of these dragons were something spectacular and still are. Even seeing them in the vengeful plated gear brings a tear to my eye.

Isle of Quel'Danas: A quest hub, a raid area and dungeon as well as gank central depending on where you were and how far you were from the guards, this tiny island was a play for great mayhem.

World Bosses of The Burning Crusade: Doomlord Kazzak in Throne of Kil'Jaeden and The Fel Reaver thing outside of Black Temple... those were some fun battles. Chaotic and insane. Not to mention if you were leveling in Hellfire, those Fel Reavers roaring behind you and being a skull at level 60 scared the bejesus out of you. You'd run for cover or be killed by it.

Unlocking Heroic:The keys. IF you don't remember the damn keychain next to your bags, then you didn't play in The Burning Crusade. To EARN Heroic, you had to farm rep to honored. Once honored, you get the key to the dungeons that are located in that area by the vendor. Or you needed to be attuned to it like for Magister's Terrace. You couldn't waltz in heroic and be like "Straight outta Azeroth and I'm NWNC (Newbie With No Clue)." You had to learn as you go and you had to travel to the dungeons, using summoning stones. Heroics took a while to clear but the rewards felt earned. And it was a step closer to raiding.

Raids:Karazhan was so interesting to me. I didn't get to see it until I was running it with the best guild on the server. I was frost, and didn't know jack about raiding, just I needed to kill things and do what they told me. Gruul's Lair. Magtheridon's Lair. Serpent Shrine. The Eye. Black Temple. Sunwell Plateau. All these were so much fun and all were unique.

I did play the end of Vanilla, but The Burning Crusade did have a lot of content that needed to be earned. I think that's the best thing that came from the expansion because it led to further develop the future ones. It laid the foundation and will always be my favorite.

[Deleted]

I chose TBC, because everything I managed felt like an accomplishment. Grinding out reputation to even access heroics, spending time getting the bone waste towers in groups to try and get spirit shards, attunement quests, Sky guard rep. IQD unlock (which was the basis for Isle of Thunder), Halaa. Getting anywhere and doing anything involved time investment and alot of effort, especially given the difficulty level of the game back then. And when you finally got there, you had the sense of achievement - you told everyone in guild and they were all really happy for you. You had payoff.

Wrath had very little end game world content - it was either Argent Tournament, rep grinds or Wintergrasp. It was one of my favourite expansions, but the difficulty rating went waaay down and so did the sense of achievement.

Cata... lets not even go there.

MoP was an interesting one, because every major patch brought a significant amount of additional world content. Lions Landing, Throne of Thunder, Timeless Isle. It varied it up, gave you something different. My problem with it was purely down to time gating. Rather than having to spend a month to get something due to difficulty and requirements, MoP time gated everything. Things took 6+ weeks because it was dailies only, which gave a set amount of rep/day. For this, it comes second in my mind, as it artificially extended world content.

[Redecle]

Can't really vote for one option only, they all had their ups and downs.
Yeah overall WotLK was the best expansion, but was a combination of numerous things.
Would be more beneficial to list at which point each world content feature was at it's peak.

Questing, i'd actually have to go Cataclysm or MoP on this one, it's a really tight battle, BUT a notation here, this is purely end game questing as a game system, NOT dailies.

Dailies, WoD, no doubt, cause there almost was none. The horrible nightmare of dailies that TBC started finally met it's end at WoD.
Again a notation, story is not deciding factor here or with questing, it's merely the game system in itself.
My hopes are the Legion will actually introduce a new DYNAMIC game system that replaces the daily system completely.
The low point of dailies was during TBC and MoP. 5.1 Landfall hurrr and 'the everyones rose tinted nostalgia glasses', still more than enough bugged Ogri'la etc flying dailies during tbc. Horrible.

Storytelling, was the best during WotLK, MoP coming close second. Story is something that's implemented in almost everything the game has that contains anything that happens in the quest lines to end raid bosses and between. In that WotLK had the most solid story. MoP drops to the second place mainly cause of the ending MoP had, Garrosh essentially was the downfall of MoP storytelling, so anticlimatic.

Reputations, there's no comparison here, WotLK had and has the best reputation system till date. If at any point reputations combined with dailies can even be a good system, but at least there was the variation and inclusion of the tabards to the reputation system. WoD mob grind was the worst, TBC had an idea to combine dungeons and dailies, but WotLK did even that multiple times better, plus TBC era was the worst in the grind length, WoD had no options, but if time consumption required was the only factor TBC would have been the worst offender in this.

Attunements, TBC was the only era if you exclude purely time gated content that has happened after it. I sort of support attunements thematically, they make sense for raids. They are an utmost horrible thing if you have to replace and carry new members to your level of content like Tier 4 recruits to Tier 6. So they are not convenient in any way, but thematically they have a point.
For 5mans HCs, meaning the keys, NOPE, worth zero. They were a tool to separate "bad" players from doing heroics, but there's many better ways to do this.

Timegating, there's no winners here. Anything that's artificially timegated is just a failure of game design. I get that such is made to protect players from themselves and burn out, but still options, choice and freedom is what makes MMOs great. If you are intending to do a "time gating" at least do it in a way that's not artificial, like the raid wing doors that magically open every couple weeks, how about making a wing end boss that takes couple of weeks to defeat until you can move onwards, tuned to the max and if you're really good enough you may proceed earlier.

World PVP, at what point is this legimate, that's the real question. During vanilla before BGs, that's probably the peak point, mainly cause there was nothing else how to do this.
It needs something more than any of the expansion have been able to provide to work. Most of the bigger scale things that have actually tried to create it Wintergrasp, Tol Barad, Ashran have all ended up being instanced, nothing more than a regular BG. Things that tried to create it in TBC the zone wide control points were nowhere near enough, Hellfire Peninsula is nothing more but a gank fest, there's not world "pvp", people questing and leveling there don't attack and fight each other, they are leveling, people don't have time or incentive to do such thing. HP is just another bottle neck for level 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, 110s to gank level 58-64. Only time actually meaningful wpvp happened was during release of those expansion when there was everyone leveling at the same time fighting over mobs, cause there literally weren't enough of them. Same thing that happened during Mount Hyjal at 80, but even at that point it's only the launch rush a week after.. leveling alts it's just max levels bored ganking lowbies. The only peak point in this was Halaa, it had something in it that people wanted other than measuring their own genital length. The world needs more things that need controlling that grant access to make wpvp work, fortresses, castles, access to waypoints to "daily" areas, but in order for all of this to work properly it needs forced realm faction balance. There's no way such system would work in the current balance, servers leaning 90% to one side, 10% of the players would either not have to care at all about the access to such things cause there's no way to gain control of those things. Good example was the previously mentioned Halaa during TBC, my server had one famous pvp warrior on horde side, who could pretty much single handedly control the entire town, he was there like 24/7 just pvping and he kept entire groups of pve players from capturing it, alone. Hence having one objective is not enough and having like 5% zone wide xp buff is not enough. Combining multiple objectives that create different needs to be fulfilled at different times. Ashran has this idea, but it's just not executed right.

Flying, world content or not as it is. It's can be tied to it, like the netherwing eggs during TBC. I'm pro-flying, it's something a fantasy world needs. But when it comes to world content, it's about how to unlock it. Long quest chain has proven to be a good way as in TBC or multiple activity chain like WoD. BUT the netherwing eggs was a one time thing, when they redid that in MoP with the dragons, i was like NOT AGAIN. You can't just take the same idea and redo it in the next expansion, the quest chain needs to be different. That's a big NO. WoDs problem was that it was all over the place, there was no unifying theme, it was just devs saying we want you to do all the things available to see what we created. Half the things in there had NOTHING what so ever to do with flying, like the reputations.. what.. why..? There was no story behind it, just pam here's the steps do them.

Scale, depends on the activity. Overall WotLK was the best here. Flying and world exploration pretty much means the whole world. "Dailies" i'd also say the whole world Azeroth and beyond, there's more options there than just one zone, it's somewhat tied to the theme, but let's say Legion invasion, can easily be tied to any existing zone. Smaller scale the Isle of Thunder is good, Timeless Isle was a little too hard to navigate, cause a lot of movement required trickery and jumping puzzles. Isle of Quel'danas was way too dense, you know all server is going to be there, on pvp server just doing your merely daily quests can turn in to hours cause the ganking grows in to such a huge problem it erases all other content there. It's not fun if you just want to log in and do your daily duties in 15 mins and that turns in to a 5 hour marathon on which faction can kill what spawn and when. It creates toxicity in the community, wpvp can exist, but it needs a reason other than "hey you just stole my mob tag that i've been waiting for 15mins" and the chain effect is ready, this just drives people to prefer playing alone in an empty server. No one stays calm if pushed enough and after that point it's just plain red bloody sight of blood and stress, hence the point of having fun and games ends and it becomes work. This combined with anonymity and the party of asshats is ready. You can go a life time in real life and maybe possibly find 2-4 people you just can't stand, and spend 15 minutes in an MMO and find 30 people you're ready to brutally torture murder and sit in jail for. That's just not right.. in any standard.

World bosses, this one is a combination of MoP, WoD and TBC. It ranges from rares to bosses. Short spawns and long spawns. Having weekly lockouts and then just farmable. The difference has to come from the scaling. The standard type has been around since vanilla, weekly lockout, huge raid or two to defeat. Should be the best rewards. Then degrading in rewards from there, at least in gear rewards. Mounts etc can vary, some can definitely be farmable. Epicness is tied to the boss or character. Kazzak for example many think more epic than some WoD random boss in Tanaan, cause there's a clear story and reason for the boss. If you've done the Spires questlines in WoD Rukhmar makes a lot more sense as world boss.

Professions, MoP just for the sake of the farm and fishing content. Otherwise this category is really underutilized by Blizzard so far. It's mostly just gathering professions. Last time this was properly utilized was vanilla and specially the server wide war effort during the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. Instead of artificially gating things just because of reasons, better way would be to make players use these tools together to unlock something, baseline resource management from Warcraft the RTS. Craft and acquire things to unlock further progress, things that could have been used for Quel'danas or Isle of Thunder progress. Isle of Thunder had a little bit of this, but Quel'danas was just do dailies enough until next phase unlock then do some more dailies.

Archaeology and treasures, this is something that could be combined, the treasure hunting is fun and exciting, most of it is leveling content, but could be done as end game content just as ease.
The current archaeology system is a gimmick and boring, combining these two might create a lot more fun experience. Instead of surveying around like a muppet, why not solve mini puzzles, find chests, collect fragments and keystones, maybe even do some jumping puzzles every once in a while, then combine keystones and fragments of different type to make the archaeology artifacts.

Grinds, there can still be grinds, i'm sure some people enjoy them. Like the bones from dinos in MoP. Not really related to reps or anything else, but was a grind for a mount and stuff.
Just moderate it more and have more variation, doing a grind is the easy way to implement things in to the game, everything can be made in to one. It's the things that differ from it that mean more.

On the other side we can mention things that did NOT equal good world content. Some that have been mentioned already, the WoD reputations, TBC dailies, 5man HC keys, bottleneck wpvp that just creates ganking opportunities afterwards when the content is not current anymore (this out to be solved in Legion already since the zones can be done in whatever order you desire), more of the gimmick type dailies in Argent Tournament (the game engine is not made for these, they are fun and new once, after that annoyance, either re do the whole engine to handle different type of world physics or just give up on them.), more dailies to this list with 5.1 Landfall, garrisons ( had to mention it, this doesn't include having player housing, it can work, but it cannot be a thing that provides everything the player needs for free. Best way for player housing to work is for it to be purely cosmetical, it's a setting where people can create their own gameplay, rp, whatever.. There can be functions, the MoP farm for example is a cool idea, but if it entirely removes the need for one profession, well, might aswell remove the profession then.. You can't wait for NPCs to do mission for you, you do the missions and then go play house back in to the garrison with a wife and a family or something), what else.. Well it mostly revolves around the same one type, 'boring, static, repetitive, kill-same-15-wolves every (TBC, WotLK, Cata) or every (MoP) other day'.
I just hope, oh i hope so much that in Legion the adventure mode whatever it is creates daily quests from a giant pool of information so that you never or at least not during a year period do one daily q twice. As that daily content can and should exist, something that regenerates itself, is dynamic in a sense that things evolve in the game world, situations change, dominance over areas change and the quest system adjust accordingly. New choices and multiple options can emerge on daily basis.

[Deleted]

11.000 ppl think MoP was the best of all time from those, holy swag lord...
I guess those are all girls or at least not "man". And when they see a PANDA. "Ohhh, so cute, ohhh" like those damaged ones in the yellow houses...

Endgame World Content:
Let me clear to you what was in MoP:
- Mr. timeless "0,1% drop" island without flying, same textures, mobs from other zones. Nothing new.
- a good pet battle tournament
- a medicore world boss
- 20 quests on that island and endless, brainless farm
- the monkey thing was good, I liked that.
- and for how many months? yeah that is right.
ToT island was far better but that was not the "endgame" content in MoP.

[roahn the warlock]

11.000 ppl think MoP was the best of all time from those, holy swag lord...
I guess those are all girls or at least not "man". And when they see a PANDA. "Ohhh, so cute, ohhh" like those damaged ones in the yellow houses...

Endgame World Content:
Let me clear to you what was in MoP:
- Mr. timeless "0,1% drop" island without flying, same textures, mobs from other zones. Nothing new.
- a good pet battle tournament
- a medicore world boss
- 20 quests on that island and endless, brainless farm
- the monkey thing was good, I liked that.
- and for how many months? yeah that is right.
ToT island was far better but that was not the "endgame" content in MoP.

Endgame means anything that happens after you hit max level. Jesus dude, turn down the teenaged angst

[borek21]

11.000 ppl think MoP was the best of all time from those, holy swag lord...
I guess those are all girls or at least not "man". And when they see a PANDA. "Ohhh, so cute, ohhh" like those damaged ones in the yellow houses...

Endgame World Content:
Let me clear to you what was in MoP:
- Mr. timeless "0,1% drop" island without flying, same textures, mobs from other zones. Nothing new.
- a good pet battle tournament
- a medicore world boss
- 20 quests on that island and endless, brainless farm
- the monkey thing was good, I liked that.
- and for how many months? yeah that is right.
ToT island was far better but that was not the "endgame" content in MoP.

You are officially the stupidest person I've ever seen on the internet. Congratulations dude. Jesus Christ.

[Stalrag]

i like so much

[Tenjen]

these looks great and many match both the theme and colors of my transmogs. awesome

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

I genuinely love how WotLK is on top of that poll. I loved WotLK and I think the game has gone downhill since. I'm going to try Legion but other than that I'm not really invigorated by any MMO. I love raiding and it seems WoW has the only decent raiding environment. Too bad.

Here's hoping we get some time-walking raids to go with the dungeons. Ulduar, Nax, ICC... Would all be great. I'd love to see the BC and Classic ones closer to the way they felt back then as well.

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Archaeology and treasures[/B], this is something that could be combined, the treasure hunting is fun and exciting, most of it is leveling content, but could be done as end game content just as ease.
The current archaeology system is a gimmick and boring, combining these two might create a lot more fun experience. Instead of surveying around like a muppet, why not solve mini puzzles, find chests, collect fragments and keystones, maybe even do some jumping puzzles every once in a while, then combine keystones and fragments of different type to make the archaeology artifacts.

I love the idea of combining treasures with archaeology. Makes sense, story-wise, and would make both more fun. Why shouldn't the treasures have a story to go with the map? And archaeology have more rewards?

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I can't believe so many people voted for WOTLK. Wrath endgame world content means Argent Tournament, which was really awful.

I enjoyed the Argent Tournament. Then again, my main was a DK and I felt a connection to Tirion. I collected all the mounts, had fun with the dailies, and still wear the Argent Tourney tabard in WoD.

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I did read the question. I still liked Wrath the best. Followed closely by MoP.

I liked the Argent Tournament dailies. I liked Hodir. I liked Wyrmrest Accord. Ebon Blade, Kalu-ak...I enjoyed them all. I don't have much of a taste for PvP but I even liked Wintergrasp. I really enjoyed the story & lore incorporated into all of the rep grinds. I still enjoy these zones the most whenever leveling new toons as well. I get to Northrend as quickly as I can, and I stay as until I've completed Icecrown's story quests fully.

Wintergrasp was my favorite PvP zone of all time. Was almost always a close finish, no matter who won. And tangible reward with the chance to claim a couple of badges in the ensuing raid. Several ways to engage in Wintergrasp too, between the tanks and walls and crowds or running around the edges... I actually looked forward to it on a regular basis, and haven't felt that way about any of the others.